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Seven Beauties

1975 – Italy – Directed by Lina Wurtmuller – 115 min.

Seven Beauties isn’t the account of a man’s fall from dignity, because Pasqualino (the main character) never had any – and that’s what makes it intriguing. Why did Wertmuller make it? To explore banality and cruelty? To give us a vision of the Nazi experience in which moral choices are irrelevant and the characters join together in a grim mutual debasement? To make, as an exercise, an ultimate black comedy? The movie seems to be a working out on a subconscious level of behavior patterns Miss Wertmuller finds both fascinating and inexplicable. – (Roger Ebert)

Thursday, November 12th – CLO 110 @ 6:30pm

White Nights

1957 – Italy – Directed by Luchino Visconti – 101 min.

Marcello Mastroianni, as a lonely city transplant, and Maria Schell, as a sheltered girl haunted by a lover’s promise, meet by chance on a canal bridge and begin a tentative romance that quickly entangles them in a web of longing and self-delusion. Luchino Visconti’s White Nights, an exquisite adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s short story of the same name, translates this romantic, shattering tale of two restless souls into a ravishing black-and-white dream. – (Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, The Criterion Collection)

Wednesday, November 18th – CLO 110 @ 6:30pm

I Vitteloni

1953 – Italy – Directed by Federico Fellini – 103 min.

I Vitelloni – “young bulls” or “slackers” (my translation) – is above all a story about friends mired in a seaside town. This is a film that crackles with rebellious energy and yet is also shot through with a sort of melancholy for Fellini’s own formation as a young artist: it marks both the central and the end point of his apprenticeship as a great filmmaker. It is about leaving youth behind. Half a century on, with Fellini’s films now viewed down the long end of the telescope, “I Vitelloni” seems, like its young protagonists, the first edgy stirrings of a young artist, confident, ready for anything, but also profoundly, disturbingly modern. – (Jonathan Dawson, Senses of Cinema)

Thursday, December 2nd – CLO 110 @ 6:30pm

Gomorrah

2009 – Italy – Directed by Matteo Garrone – 135 min.

Gomorrah is a dense, sprawling exposé of the corruption plaguing the communities of Naples and Caserta in modern-day Italy. The all-powerful Camorra syndicate influences the lives of even the most innocent citizens. In a manner similar to The Wire, Garrone tells his story from many different angles, resulting in a complicated narrative that often feels novelistic. In many cases, the revolving stories never overlap or intersect. While that may be jarring to those viewers who are used to having their strings tied neatly for them by a film’s conclusion, Garrone’s decision results in an experience that feels much more honest and true. – (IFC Films)

Let the Right One In

2008 – Sweden – Directed by Tomas Alfredson

The vampire coming-of-age movie ‘Let The Right One In’ begins and ends with snow. Incessant, bleak, snow. Falling against a backdrop of impenetrable night. The film is a genre movie by way of Ingmar Bergman. It’s a contemplative, deliberately-paced meditation on loneliness, adolescence, friendship and adulthood. In terms of approach, the film by director Tomas Alfredson de-romanticizes the vampire genre to an extreme degree, one not seen, perhaps, since George A. Romero’s ‘Martin’ in 1976. – John Muir (Reflections on Film)

Thursday, October 15th – SUL 353 YJean Chambers Hall @ 6:30pm

Tesis

1995 – Spain – Directed by Alejandro Amenabar

‘Tesis’ is a film about a film student writing an assignment on violence on film, which is appropriate because Tesis is itself, an assignment written by Alejandro Amenábar on violence and the state of the Spanish film industry. The film is a quietly creepy psychological thriller about a young college student, Ángela, investigating the social fascination with sensational violence for her thesis project. In her search for violent video footage, she stumbles onto what may be a real live snuff film, a videotape that her professor was watching before his untimely death. Amenabar’s skill at weaving a paranoid world where evil may lurk behind every friendly face is undeniable. – (FilmBug.com)

Wednesday, October 21st – CLO 110 @ 6:30pm

Oldboy

2003 – South Korea – Directed by Park Chan-wook

‘Oh Dae-su has been locked up for 15 years without once seeing another living person. ‘Oldboy’ watches him objectively, asking no sympathy, standing outside his plight. When he suddenly finds himself freed from his bizarre captivity 15 years later, he is a different person, focused on revenge. In its sexuality and violence, this is the kind of movie that can no longer easily be made in the United States; the standards of a puritanical minority make studios unwilling to produce films that might face uncertain distribution. But content does not make a movie good or bad — it is merely what it is about. ‘Oldboy’ is a powerful film not because of what it depicts, but because of the depths of the human heart which it strips bare. – Roger Ebert

Thursday, October 29th – SUL 353 YJean Chambers Hall @ 6:30pm

Onibaba

1964 – Japan – Directed by Kaneto Shindo

The premise of ‘Onibaba’ has the ring of folklore: in feudal Japan, two women – a mother and her daughter-in-law – manage their hardscrabble existence on a marshy plain by luring errant samurai to their deaths and selling off their wear. Onibaba shows less interest in laying bare its meanings than in offering the occasion for the viewers’ meditations on life, existence, and whatever lies below. Kiyomi Kuroda’s black-and-white cinematography haunts as much as the proceedings themselves, particularly in the picture’s eerie nighttime passages. And Hikaru Hayashi’s unnerving score has a fever to it equal to the strangest images on-screen. – Jake Euker (filmcrtic.com)

Wednesday, September 16th – CLO 110 @ 6:30pm

Italian for Beginners

2000 – Denmark/Sweden – Directed by Lone Scherfig

The film takes place in a squalid Copenhagen suburb where emotions and anxiety seemingly run amok. While the actual narrative is simplistic, it profiles six desperately needy and complicated individuals looking to fulfill themselves. Just as life shoots uncontrollable twists and turns at these folks, the characters also turn their attention into mastering the Italian tongue. The focus is meant to ease their frustrations over life and love, to the point where the “beginners” literally beg for a whole new beginning. Conquering the foreign language is a metaphor for the mending of a broken heart or the escape from the vicious circle of daily life. Italian for Beginners is an intoxicatingly spry and entertaining romantic comedy produced under the auspices of Lars Von Trier’s Dogme 95 guidelines. – Frank Ochieng (FilmCritic.com)

Tuesday, September 22nd – CLO 110 @ 6:30pm

Vicky Cristina Barcelona

2008 – United States – Directed by Woody Allen

Bathed in light so lusciously golden and honeyed that you might be tempted to lick the screen, “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” is a rueful comedy about two young American women who, during a summertime European idyll, savor many of the Continental delicacies that such travelers often take pleasure in: art, music, culture, yes, but also strange bodies and unexpected dreams. These bodies and dreams open possibilities for the women, intimating freer, somehow different lives, despite the persistent tugging of a voice that hovers at the edge of this story trying to pull it and its characters down to earth, where desire can fade quickly. – Mahnola Dargis (New York Times)

Wednesday, September 30th – CLO 110 @ 6:30pm

The Dreamers

2004 – France – Directed by Bernando Bertolucci

Bernardo Bertolucci’s “The Dreamers” is an ambitious and exciting piece of work, a movie about sex and movies made by a filmmaker who understands the power of each to set off fantasy, create addiction, incite danger and transform the spirit. The film also touches on politics, but politics at a time when politics was also inseparable from fantasy — the spring of 1968, in Paris — a period of student protest and riots. As films are discussed or re-enacted, Bertolucci cuts to brief snippets from the original movies, using the clips not as points of reference but as a way of depicting how these fragmentary moments, little sparks of consciousness, can light up the imagination. I have never seen a film that better captures the interface of movies and real life, and there’s something thrilling in that. – Mick LaSalle (San Francisco Chronicle)

Disclaimer – The Dreamers is rated NC-17 for nudity and strong sexuality